Is your creative space a refuge?
I’ve been thinking a lot about disappearing our minds away into imaginary spaces.
We all do this, I think. Maybe we don’t always think of it like this, but letting our minds wander through crafted scenarios, daydreaming, thinking over problems and relationships, pondering strange ideas and realities… it all adds up to a kind of mental drift work.
It feels foundational to creativity, to me at least.
I had a quirky childhood—we all do I suppose—and my imagination was a place I could sneak away to when I needed to get away from reality. Oops. A bit of personal insight there—maybe, but I think there are likely a lot of us who use imagination as a kind of escape from the here and now.
I’m certainly no therapist, but it does lead me to ponder how much creative expression is intertwined with exploration of our own mental realms—and how much of it happens because we are cleaning out the cobwebs of our own consciousness while we’re biding time hiding out from real world problems.
As an adult I escape into meditative spaces when I run or write or just sitting back in a comfortable chair, and some of the best ideas I have are not things I’m chasing down but rather explorations I’m making through this mental space I’ve built for myself over a lifetime.
I thought maybe that was weird… but perhaps it’s just human.